We had to put our Daisy down in August. She was 14.5 yrs old, was a rot mix. She had hip dysplasia for about 10 years but did well on Rimadyl. Abruptly, her back legs began to go out from under her and we had to help her get back on her feet. The vet did a procedure (PRP injections) which helped a couple of days. He added a couple more meds which helped a couple of days only. Finally, she could not stand up long enough to eat or toilet herself, and we had to let her go.  We buried her in her favorite corner of our back yard. For 33 years of our marriage, we have always had at least one dog. I could not stand NOT having a dog. So, 3 days after Daisy left us, we went to the Animal Services of our county and chose 2 dogs to adopt: A 10 month old Rot mix, Mandy, who really resembles Daisy, and a 2 year old male Matlese mix: Percy.  While I still get sad about Daisy, reallly cumulative sadness over all the pets lost through the years, it has helped me tremendously to have 2 new dogs to love.

— Cindy from Ft. Myers, FL

I am fond of dachshunds. After leaving the active Army, I got 3 to keep each other company while I was away working.
For some reason, Fritz suffered some of the same tragedies I suffered in my life, like me usually lucking out. I was run over by a drunk on my motorcycle and survived relatively unharmed due to highway bars holding the car over me. Fritz got run over by a fast moving car and was so low that he was only rolled and survived unharmed. I was drowned as a child and rescued just in time. Fritz fell through ice in a lake and I rescued him (recklessly risking my own). Fritz hurt his back escaping a fire that burned me. He was one of the rare recovery cases as was I.
Fritz loved his ball. I resolved to play fetch with him once to see if it was possible to tire him. We played for hours and hours-he won.
Some people could not imagine themselves getting such an unusual looking dog. You have to have a dachshund to know what great dogs they are. I would have never guessed if someone else had not influenced me to get one. Once they have one, many people never want another breed.

— Brent from Defiance, OH

Two years ago, right after Christmas, we lost our family dog, Cole. He had been with us from the time he was a few months old until he died after twelve and a half years of being a loyal and true friend. Even after so much time had passed, when i came home from work, I expected to be greeted by him at the door. My daughters have been after me to get another dog but I didn’t feel we would be able to take care of a dog with our hectic schedules. This summer we began talking about it again and I finally agreed we could get another dog as long as everyone committed to taking good care of it. We decided to get another puppy and went online to find a dog in need of adoption. We found a shepherd-chou pup that had been rescued in Kentucky. Lucy joined our family a week and a half ago and has made herself at home. As I watched her running in the snow today, it reminded me of Cole and how he loved to run and play.

— Xavier from Gaithersburg, MD

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In Memory of Griffen from the Canada Free Press

Riehl World View: In Memory of Mark Levin’s Dear Griffen

In 1994 we adopted a 2 year old Golden Retriever named Luke from a local rescue club. He quickly became our best friend and an inseparable part of our family over the next 8 years. Just a few days after he turned 10 years old, we lost him when he was hit by a car in front of our house. December 5, 2002 still reigns as the worst night of my life. I can’t even talk about it because I blame myself for what happened, and will probably never be able to forgive myself. What we didn’t know then, was that it was just the beginning of a series of events that would forever change our lives. We were so devastated by losing Luke that we didn’t want to think about getting another Golden for awhile, but just a few weeks later we heard through a friend that the local Humane Society had a Golden Retriever that she thought we might be interested in.
I couldn’t resist, so I went down there to see the dog, and that’s when Marley came bounding into our lives. She was a very exuberant 1 ½ year old girl who seemed very sweet, and I fell in love immediately. On New Year’s Eve we were about to begin the new year with a new dog! We found out that Marley had belonged to a family who paid her little attention, and this was the fourth time she had been found running loose and was picked up by the Humane Society. This time, when the folks at the Humane Society called her owners, they said “keep her, we don’t want her back”. They have no idea what they gave up.
Marley thrived in our home; she finally was getting all the love and attention that she had been craving for so long. We adored Marley, and she and Dolly became best buddies. We called her “Marleybone”.
Summer came, and somewhere in the middle of July I had taken Marley outside one morning, and when we were heading back into the house she suddenly acted like she was in pain. When she didn’t get better, I took her in to the vet. He gave us some meds for her, which seemed to help at first, but a few days later she was unable to move her hind legs. Our vet referred us to a specialist, and she responded really well to the steroids he gave her. He assured us that all we needed to do was wean her off the steroids over a couple of weeks and she should make a full recovery. Our relief and joy was short-lived though, because within 24 hours she once again was unable to walk without dragging her useless hind legs behind her. We took her back for further testing, and the results were devastating. She had a tumor on her spinal cord, presumable malignant. She was only 2 years old, so it was nearly impossible to wrap my mind around this. The only way to know for sure and to decide what combination of chemo drugs she needed would be to biopsy the tumor, but the only way to do a biopsy was through surgery. He didn’t want to do surgery because the high risk of permanent paralysis outweighed the benefits. IF he could successfully do it, the best we could hope for was to buy her maybe a year of living with the side effects of chemo. No matter what we did, at the end of the day we would still lose this wonderful creature.
Very few things are as heartbreaking as walking out of the vet’s office with an empty collar, but when it was clear that she could no longer live the life of a dog and nothing more medically could be done, the one last kind and loving thing we could do for her was to let her go.
What I learned from that whole experience is that God’s plans don’t always make sense at first. We were so completely devastated to have lost two very beloved dogs in just 8 months. Why us? I later came to realize that what happened with Marley had never been about us. All the grieving we did for what we lost wasn’t about us. This was all part of God’s plan. He created the path to lead us to Marley so she could know the love of a devoted family in the little time that she had left. Luke had lived a full 10 year life, and was probably spared the all kinds of pain and everything else that goes along with being a geriatric dog. It was about Marley needing us. We were God’s servants, and our purpose was to make the rest of Marley’s life as full and happy as it could be. From this I learned to deal with loss and I learned that things happen for a reason, and eventually everything will be okay and life will go on. For all the pain and grief of those last few weeks with Marley, there is not one single minute of the time we had her that I would trade for anything in the world because the joy and unconditional love she gave us will always be with us.
A week after Marley died we saw an ad in the paper and after a quick phone call we hurried off to a farm in western Iowa to bring home our new Golden Retriever puppy. We had decided not to get another dog for awhile, but the very next day we wondered how long we would be able to stand not having a Golden in our lives. We realized that we had done most of our grieving while Marley was still alive, so it made sense that we were ready so soon. “Katie” is 8 years old now, and if we hadn’t lost Luke and then lost Marley, we wouldn’t have this beautiful, loving friend that we have now.

— Kathy from Fremont, NE

On December 7, 2010, at about 2:00 PM, Paine, my canine companion, was gently put to sleep by his vet. He was, as usual, at his sentry post at a corner of the deck, overlooking the yard. The last touch he felt was me cradling his head and the last sounds he heard were me telling him that he was a “Good Boy”. At the end, he was, as all living creatures are, defeated by time. In his last exam before letting Painey Boy depart, Doc advised he had severe hip dysplasia and probably a cancer of his prostate, bladder or urinary tract. Paine was 15 1/2 years old and had been adopted from Friends of Homeless Animals about ten years ago.

I could tell many stories of my Adventures with Paine, but suffice it to say he and I went through hell and high water together. He has been my ever-faithful companion for a decade, a fierce protector, a ferocious combatant in battles with ‘coons, skunks and ground hogs and, yes, occasionally my confidante. His greatest achievements were that he survived a hell of being locked in a cage for five or more years by his previous owner and that he became the most accomplished pup I’ve ever had or been around. Hell, he went to France with me, wowed the Frenchies and is the only pup I ever knew to swim in the English Channel. He was, by far, the most intelligent canine companion I’ve had come live with me and almost eerily perceptive about anything I needed him to do. We eventually came to a point where a look, gesture, body position or slight sound from either would put us on the same page, same sentence, same word. He was a magnificent companion.

My Boy taught me one helluva lot about good old dawgs and for that and for Paine just being Paine, I have no words.

After his heart stopped, Doc helped me wrap him in an American flag shroud for which to be cremated in. I don’t really give a damn if anyone feels this is disrespect for the Flag. He was an All-American Canine and named for Thomas Paine. A neighbor with a pickup truck transported us to the SPCA. I rode in the bed of the truck with my Boy on our last ride together.

It will be most strange to not awaken 45 minutes before a sliver of dawn breaches blackness to get ready for our just-barely-daylight first walk of the day.

— Joe from Charlottesville, VA